Avaya Launches Consulting Services To Help Drive UC To The Cloud

Avaya Tuesday launched two new professional services offerings, including one to help customers transition their unified communications (UC) strategies to the cloud.

The two new services, called Cloud Transformation Services and Continuous Performance Services, will be performed by Avaya's own group of roughly 1,500 "specialists," but partners can still offer them on top of their other Avaya sales, said Ajay Kapoor, vice president, Avaya Professional Services Strategy and Business Development.

"[Services] are delivered by Avaya Professional Services; however, our partners frequently use this as a value-add on top of what they are offering already," Kapoor said, adding that partners receive varied discounts on Avaya services based on the volume they sell.

Kapoor said these services are especially helpful to smaller solution providers, which often lack the resources to stand up a professional services arm of their own.

"Where [partners] don't have the skill or footprint, we become an extension of them," he said.

The first of the two new offerings is Cloud Transformation Services, a set of services aimed at cloud service providers and enterprise customers transitioning their Avaya communications systems to a hosted environment. For the enterprise, Avaya said it will provide services including cost-benefit analysis of different cloud delivery models, financial modeling, evaluating a business' collaboration technologies and designing architectures for cloud-based communications.

For cloud service providers, Avaya said it will provide end-to-end guidance for deploying a hosting strategy, ranging from architectural designs to the testing stage.

The second new services offering, Continuous Performance Services, are designed to ensure an organization's network and communications applications are performing as optimally as possible. Avaya is offering these services in a unique, subscription-based model, through which customers receive prescribed consulting engagements on an either an annual, quarterly or monthly basis.

Kapoor said the aim of Avaya's Continuous Performance Services is to help customers get the most of their technology investments, something that isn't always guaranteed, or taken advantage of, through traditional maintenance contracts.

"We're finding that clients are purchasing technology and then there are multiple decisions they need to make, whether it's a maintenance contract, a managed services contract, or both of those. The client needs to get the most of their asset," Kapoor said. "But we've found across a number of clients that, especially with communications, ... they are purchasing the asset, they get the first round of benefits and then it falls flat after that."

Out of the gate, Avaya's Continuous Performance Services will focus on four key areas: security assurance, self-service application tuning, SIP economic consulting and network visualization. Kapoor said more services will be rolled out over time.